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Batterylife Activator Reviewed
Daniel Rutter writes "Slashdot chewed over the BatMax Battery Life Booster - a nanotechnomagical sticker that's meant to rejuvenate lithium ion batteries - a while ago. Now I've reviewed the strikingly similar Batterylife Activator, and subjected it to actual empirical testing, with automated datalogging and everything. The results confirmed my original suspicion -- that the local Batterylife branch made a serious error of judgement when they decided to send me their product."
not on slashdot, they are just fraudsters and your local trading standards should be stopping these types of scam companies from operating in the first place and protect the consumer/citizen
truth in advertising should be all they need to shut them down, all of the products are false and provably so
Here in the US they just recently started looking into the "Enzyte" (penis growth stuff) people, I knew it was a scam 4 years ago when I saw the first commercial. I read the enzyte people have made 50 million dollars so far (and that was sometime last year). Would you goto jail for a couple years for 50 million dollars? I would.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Actual tests of batteries always show that the cheapest batteries are the best value for money, in terms of watt hours per dollar. ...For the same composition. For example, non-rechargable carbon ("heavy duty") batteries cost maybe 50% as much as alkaline but only provide about 10% of the electrons.
Also, many modern rechargable batteries and their chargers contain sophisticated circuitry (RTFA) which can vary considerably from mfr to mfr. This probably won't have much impact initially but may greatly increase the life of the battery or simply make it safer.
I hate to say it, but he has flawed results that do not demonstrate that the sticker is a placebo.
He used only one battery to do his test. He should have used two; one with the sticker and one without. By only using one battery, running 3 tests, then putting the sticker on and running a 4th test, he's introduced an additional variable into the equation. It could thereofre be argued that his graph (http://www.dansdata.com/images/batterylife/activ
"The real question is why aren't the governments in places where these are sold stomping these people to bits?"
Ya know, while I'm not one to worship at the altar of free market and deregulation and all that crap, I really have to wonder at this statement. If people are stupid enough to pay money for something like this, maybe they deserve to loose their money. It isn't like there's a big potential for collateral damage here. Stupid people get punished, smarter people make some money, and maybe with time people will start learning to think for themselves for a change.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Reminds me of when i was in college -- the flunk courses were graded on a curve. And there were these fuckers who were always cheating and I could never score half as well as they did. So i worked hard for C's and D's, while people who were cheating were getting easy A's and B's. Then I realized -- the people who were cheating were *SETTING* the curve which I was being judged by. So I became a cheater to.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
A great piece of writing, but there are a massive number of variables that he failed to control:
1. Charging/Discharge period between inital tests and activator test were completely random.
2. Only one battery was used.
3. The setup was not similar to the conditions under which the activator would be used.
4. The battery type was not similar to a cellphone.
5. The device handling the charge and discharge of the battery was not a cellphone.
I certainly don't think this product is any good but a more controlled test would have been better.
Also, according to his test the activator gave a 3% boost to the battery. What is interesting is that it is 13 discharge cycles away from Run 1. The first three charge/discharge cycles clearly showed a dependency between # of cycles and battery life. To help clarify, it would have been nice if he kept the data from the intermediate 10 runs.
Maybe it did do something? I find it hard to believe though.
But what if it was something that was fraudulent but not so obvious? Should there be a difference in how they are handled? Obvious or not, fraud is fraud. These guys shouldn't be cut any slack just becasue their fraud is a little more obvious.
I agree of course the sticker is garbage, but his testing was quite poor. His four tests used 3 different charging times. The first two trials he did an overnight charge. The third test was the official charge time. The only test with the sticker was 2 hours longer than the official charge time. If you look at his test results, The battery lasts longer with the sticker than a shorter charge but not as long as with a longer charge. He didn't really prove anything. Just that a shorter charge with the sticker isn't as good as a longer charge without the sticker.
DUH the test was a waste of time and everyone here already knew it was BS, but people, have you SEEN the "cow taser" page linked to from the review article?!! I think I just pissed myself from laughing so hard.
Then it wasn't exactly a waste of time, was it?
Part of the reason people read Dan's stuff (just in case anyone missed the main link to his site) is his entertaining writing style. I almost always learn something from his articles, even if it's got nothing to do with what the article's supposedly about. Dan is obviously fully in on the joke himself or he wouldn't even be linking to things like cow tasers in his articles. It's people like you - who think reviews have to be a "waste of time" simply because the products in question are such obvious bunk - who don't seem to quite get it.
In a world where product reviews often offer little or not information at all, and where the strongest and most specific statement you might read is how one product or another is vaguely "generally good", writers like Dan are a refreshing change - he writes pieces that are always entertaining in and of themselves, often more informative than they need to be, and with plenty of useless but interesting trivia to keep you interested when the product in question is less than worthwhile. I only wish he'd review more stuff that I'm actually interested in buying (though I've become interested in buying a few things I would never have even known about but for his review).
As for this particular review, I think it's worth reminding the Slashdot crowd of the dangers of pseudo-science every now and again - pseudo-scientific articles do occasionally slip through the editing process here, and are often accepted as fact.
The test by no means disproves this device. The tester chops the sticker up so he can use it with his smaller digital camera battery. Something that the manual apparently claims should work, but this is clearly not its intended use, and thus quite possibly not its optimum use either.
He also fails to repeat the experiment at all or do a control experiment, and even the one test run he does isn't exactly thorough. Also, he does appear find some improvement when using the sticker, just not as much as the company claims, so I don't see how he thinks he has shown that it doesn't work at all (except through his scientific arguments with which he apparently convinced himself even before he did the test of the impossibility the thing could work).
Most importantly - according to the company's website the device has been tested by TÜV and found to work! I'm MUCH more likely to believe the results of TÜV certification than some hobbyist's tests (TÜV is a government body which tests + approves almost everything in Germany - cars, buildings etc. People trust it to tell them if their car is fit to drive, so it is presumably capable of sufficiently thoroughly testing in determining whether some battery enhancer works as claimed.
Of course, given the incredibility of the claims regarding the device, I'm still not neccessarily convinced. I'm just saying lets not discard the possibility that it might actually work to some degree so quickly.
Instead of doing some quick hack-up test of the device, it would be much more useful if someone could start by looking at the TÜV and A-U-F tests (A-U-F is another independent body which allegedly found it to give a 31% increase in battery life to an old Nokia phone) and seeing whether they are for real, or whether there were any flaws in their method etc etc.
Unless those "stupid people" are your parents and you suddenly find yourself having to house them because they "stupidly" invested their life savings in what turned out to be a scam. The world is a big place, you can't know everything and sometimes you too will make mistakes. Be careful what you wish for.
It depends what they certified it as. They could have said that BatteryLife is certifiably a piece of crap.
While I'm fully convinced that the Battery Life Activator is nonsense, the experiments trying to prove that it is are as poorly done as those trying to prove that it works. Grabbing a random battery out of a photo bag and cycling it a few times with and without the sticker isn't a good experimental test.
Who cares if he turned off the charger after a certain time or if it automatically shut off after a certain time?
--
Evan "Note the 'if he is correct' part"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Is this some sort of new fad? Magical stickers? They are marketed for cell phone range and lowering emissions (Only $299!?, no wonder they want you to think about THC, you have to be smoking it to buy this!) Aren't there laws against making false claims in advertisements?